CXChronicles Podcast 173 with Palak Dalal Bhatia, Founder & CEO at IrisAgent

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #173 we welcomed Palak Dalal Bhatia, Founder & CEO at Iris Agent, based in Mountain View, CA. 

With proactive support and AI-powered ticket intelligence, IrisAgent makes it easy for support teams to work collaboratively with product and engineering organizations to prevent escalations, drive informed action, and align on what really matters for your customers.

IrisAgent takes simple, repetitive tickets off your support team’s plate, but they pride themselves on being more than just a chatbot, they provide valuable insights & recommendations to aid your business.

Unlike other players in this space, they take a 360-degree view of customer support operations, leveraging product and user context to gain meaningful insight into the ‘why’ behind tickets associated with bugs, performance issues, and outages to create support workflows and recommend operational improvements to improve your customer experience & success.

In this episode of CXCP, Palak and Adrian chat through how she has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout her career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked across her customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #173 Highlight Reel:**

1. Why including your customers in your product management strategy is paramount 
2.  CX becomes the biggest competitive advantage with the  abundance of SaaS tools today
3.  Leading a proactive customer success team focused on remaining several steps ahead
4.   Building an escalation & churn review process that focuses on the root-cause of the issue
5.   Ideas for how you can build social listening & customer sentiment strategies as you scale

Huge thanks to Palak for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring her team's work and efforts in pushing the customer experience and customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Palak Dalal Bhatia

Click here to learn more about IrisAgent

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, please stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review. This is the easiest way that we can find new listeners, guests and future customer focused business leaders to tune into our weekly podcast. 

And be sure to grab a copy of our book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" on Amazon +  check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel with all of our video episodes & customer focused business leader content!

Reach out to CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com for more information about how we can help your business make customer happiness a habit!

Transcript

#173 -- Palak Dalal Bhatia, Founder & CEO at IrisAgent

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:10) - Hey guys. Thanks so much for joining another episode of the cxchronicles podcast. Super excited today, guys, we have the founder of Iris agent Pollock. Why don't you say hello to the CX nation for us? 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:00:21) - Hi, CX nation. Great to be here. Thanks everyone for having me here. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:00:25) - No, we're, we're pumped to have you, so guys, Pollock and I were talking, um, we're talking, uh, last week. It's just, she's in a super cool space, Jessica, all of us, she's thinking about customers every single day. She's thinking about building her team every single day, and she's thinking about how technology can help with all this. And she's got a super cool company, IRS agent that she's gonna walk us through today. Um, probably before we get into the four pillars, I'd love for you to just set the stage for some of our listeners. Give us a couple of minute, um, um, idea of how you got started and how you got into this space. What drew you to this whole, this whole world? And certainly what, what started to spawn some of the initial ideas and some of the initial blueprints that made you go out and want to build a, an awesome company like IRS agent? 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:01:04) - Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so I had a very interesting journey wearing multiple hats along the way. I began my career as an engineer at Microsoft, working on their search engine team. Uh, did my MBA after that and jumped into product management at Google, where I was working on Kubernetes and DevOps workflows, uh, kind of, um, using the latest technologies to help engineering teams, you know, improve the release velocity launch features faster. And as a product manager, I also noticed, you know, customer support teams kind of live in a completely different world and all the 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:01:41) - Advancements that are happening on the engineering and product sides, uh, they are great for customers, but can create some challenges for support teams, especially, you know, being in the know-how of the latest changes. So yeah, that's where it kind of, you know, saw those, solve those issues and wanted to solve it myself as well. Having been an engineer, um, as well as a product manager, I saw how the fast advances in support, uh, in, in the product and engineering domains can really augment, uh, the capabilities of the product, but create some challenges for customer support teams that I wanted to solve. Uh, and that's where it began the company a couple of years back, um, began right at the same time the pandemic hit. So it was an interesting, uh, transition, but, uh, yeah, it's been an exciting journey so far and, uh, glad to be working on this. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:02:26) - That's awesome. So, uh, number one, I think, uh, super cool background. I think, um, we've had a few folks that, that had the pleasure of working in a company like Google. I have to imagine that some of your time spent there, you must have seen, um, number one in a number of just interesting, uh, challenges that companies in that constraint modern consumers were just thinking about facing obviously Google solves a lot of, a lot of different unique problems, but number two, you must've seen some really interesting, um, up close types of views for how one of the, one of the biggest, one of the successful companies on planet earth thinks about their team and their tools and the process and the feedback. So it, must've been a really interesting way to kind of set the stage where you already thinking about how this whole data and customer insights and just general way of kind of helping companies see their, what their customers were thinking. Were you already thinking about it all the way back then, or was this, I have to measure something that was in front of you guys every single day there? 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:03:23) - Yeah. Great question. And, um, I mean, I was very fortunate to work with some of the amazing minds at Google and learn the fundamentals of product management and the coolest part of product management is the customer, you know, really understanding their needs and requirements and building products and championing the resources across the organization to serve the customer the most and having all those tools, processes, and systems in place that help deliver that. And one of the key aspects of that is today in the SAS oriented world, there are so many data silos, you know, information is siloed in different places and it's very difficult to bring all the contexts together because of this limitation of different systems and serve the customer in the best possible way. Um, yeah. So, uh, I think just fortunate, fortunate to learn all those fundamentals about serving customers, building great products, um, which really helped me in my journey right now, uh, as a founder and CEO of, you know, building something from scratch and creating value for our customers. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:04:20) - That's super cool. And that's, it's an awesome way to definitely become battle-tested plus meet a bunch of awesome smart people and just see how, how, how you can approach problems, how you can come up with different solutions. And then more importantly, how you can bring some of those solutions to a given market, right? Because all of a sudden different types of ICPSR ideal customer profiles that we gravitate towards. Now that must've been a really interesting way. The other thing I want to call it real quick, before we over to the pillars, you mentioned you guys started right as the pandemic started. So, okay. I, there, there, it's funny because we've had several guests on the show that are in the same position where this was at CXC, frankly. Uh, we, we, we got started right at the height of the pandemic. People thought we were absolutely crazy for starting the business during the pandemic.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:05:00) - What was your, what was your experience like getting, getting, getting the company, getting IRS agents started at that point was it was really difficult. Did you find that there were some unique advantages to starting at that time? What did that look like? 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:05:13) - Yeah, I'll actually ended up being a blessing in disguise, especially when you're starting a company. You need a lot of focus, time to think about the product journeys, build a product, talk to customers, potential customers. So it gave us a lot of time to just reflect introspect and really, uh, dig deeper into what we want to build, establish the use cases and the assumptions that we have in the process. Um, it wasn't as a phase of doing a lot of sales and marketing, it was just a phase of focused product development and figuring out the journey from there. The other advantage obviously, was a pandemic, uh, you know, started this whole notion of working from home. So we have been, uh, remote first, uh, from day one and we have employees, um, from multiple countries and we get, get access to that amazing talent pool. Um, and then being remote also forces you to establish some processes in the company around having a greater that 10 communication establishing, you know, asynchronous and synchronous ways to collaborate and that sort of discipline, uh, also lets us, you know, makes us think critically about, you know, what we are seeing, how we are making decisions. Um, but now the things, you know, coming, hopefully, you know, improving the, also trying to evaluate other ways of some sort of a hybrid set up where people can also, uh, meet in person and brainstorm and whiteboard. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:06:33) - I think it's going to be so cool to look back on this period. Maybe say 10 years from now and look at it like a cohort of companies that are similar to us, where you started literally during the height of the first pandemic major global pandemic that we had in so so many years. But I think what you just said, Pollock is so true. It's like companies have been flexible. They have adopted the one could argue, they left the world of where a traditional entrepreneur, they think about finding their team in where they are, right? Whether you're in San Francisco or New York city, you try to find your team locally. And you think about a very geo fence type of view. And now all of these different successful startup founders and business executives are realizing women. Now I can go literally get awesome smart experience, fantastic people everywhere, like across the planet. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:07:22) - And it's really interesting cause it's just like what an easy way to make any team, any company in any product offering that much more diverse, that much, that much deeper, wider. So super cool. I love it with that being said, let's, let's jump into that first CX pillar of team. I'd love for you to spend a couple minutes kind of giving us a sense for the team that you've been able to build some of the different roles that you guys have really kind of thought about as you've been building Irish Egypt and, and give us a sense for how the, how the team is comprised today. 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:07:49) - Yeah, definitely. And just to provide some context as to what are the requirements and what we are building as a company. Uh, and that was basically what influenced the kind of decisions we made on how we build a team. So what we do is we build a proactive customer support solution, which has AI powered, alerting, triaging, and correlation of customer support tickets to product and engineering issues. So we're bringing all of this data and systems together to, to the service of customers and resolving issues faster than improving performance internally. So with that in mind, we wanted to build a team which one is very strong in AI and machine learning. Uh, 80% of technology is actually, you know, figuring out intent and insights from unstructured data, you know, email, text, phone conversations, and so on and building those correlations, uh, as well as thinking about, uh, you know, how do we do product management? 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:08:41) - How do we do so sales and go to marketing? Um, so yeah, building, um, uh, building a team which has, uh, skills in those domains as well as diverse perspective, uh, having a global team, um, and also I think focusing a lot on people with some startup experience because they have built systems from end to end from ground up. So that has also helped me, uh, reach here. And, um, I think, yeah, I think in terms of when it comes to team and the way that we think about helping our customers also, uh, improve the collaboration between team, uh, what, I mean, it's a very simple statement that says that your teams need to work together to these performance test. Uh, it seems pretty obvious, but we hear so many stories where it does not happen. You know, there might be a bug in engineering which might be causing 10 different support tickets, which 10 different support agents are working independently on, especially now in the mode world where there might not be a lot of communication. And, um, it becomes very difficult to really, um, uh, evangelize all of these sources to get to the true source of issues and resolve them faster. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:09:46) - Yeah. A hundred percent. I think it's like number one,

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:09:49) - Um, I know that now at this 0.2 and a half, almost three years into it, most companies have figured out whatever their new normal is. Right. But you're absolutely right. Pollock, which is like the one thing that I think most companies continue to struggle with. Um, communication continues to be an issue because you don't have that many companies are moving, whether they're remote, whether they're hybrid or whether they've already completely brought everyone back into person. And those are kind of the three camps that are out there, but I would argue every company is continuing to kind of have that, that, that, that, that ongoing challenge of is our communication really sound. Is it tight? Do people understand what's north what's south? Um, and then the second piece is you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but the asynchronous piece, there's some wildly successful, wildly profitable, uh, on their way to being unicorn companies out there that are terrible with building a synchronous work. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:10:39) - So that folks, because w when I hear you say that, like, even with the Irish team, you've got people across the world, people don't have the same time zones, people that are some of our friends that work across the pond, they've already finished their Workday, right? And we're, we're just getting into ours. And this idea of building an asynchronous workplace or this idea of building, uh, almost thinking about everything that you do with across your team, across your tools, across your process management, and even the way that you think about customer to play feedback, you've got to be building with having some of those asynchronous fibers and tangled into everything, because folks are gonna sit down at their computer at different times. They're going to be on their workstations at different times. Some people are just creative at different times, and they can actually collaborate at a higher level at different hours. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:11:19) - So like, love that idea. And I think there's one thought that I keep thinking about that'd be really cool and interesting to see how companies think about building that same type of asynchronous thought for their customers too. Cause I think customers, you know, we talk about this. Everyone talks about this a lot, but Amazon has changed the way that so many of us have really come to expect things, right. We want them now we want to be able to literally be able to filter between what can we get today versus what can we get tomorrow versus what can we get 48 hours? And then we're just used to, if anything does break down in that experience, we return it and get the money back right away. Maybe we get a crisis. It's almost like they've, they've just pushed the bar up so high for the rest of us. But I think it's really cool that you guys are already kind of thinking about some of that as you're building the team. Um, before we move off this one, one quick question for you. Um, when you were starting the team, when you're starting IRS agent, what was it? The, was it the one or two areas that you knew you needed to make your first investment or you needed to bring in your first employees or your first teammates that were going to focus? What were like the two areas that you knew you needed help with? 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:12:19) - Yeah, a great question. I think one was, uh, engineering. I think we definitely needed to build something, to have something tangible that we can show to potential customers and investors and so on and get that traction in. Uh, so having, I think, uh, especially for software products in the SAS world where customer experience and user experience are so important, uh, it's super important to have a system which is scalable production ready, um, and really meet the needs of the customers. The bar for excellence when it comes to products and user experience has really gone up in a SAS world where customers can just turn away with just a click and there's no law, there's no multi-year contracts that those are that common. So one was definitely having a DocStar engineering team. And, um, secondly, I would say as, as we are starting to scale, uh, really thinking about go to market, uh, you know, what can we save, which is unique in the industry, come to customer support and experiences, a lot of material out there, a lot of noise in the space and really thinking about how we view our values and our products and how we see them, uh, adding value to the industry and telling our story, you know, in today's world, um, which is get getting more than more online. 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:13:32) - It's important to have your story and, um, make it exciting for not just potential customers, but people who want to join you or invest in, invest in you. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:13:41) - I love that Paul cause you're, especially in the SAS world or any type of technology or any type of tech tech, heavy service-based offerings, the world has got so much software and so much technology there's. So there's this, there's a text there's, there's a hundred tech solutions for every little problem and that's great. That's good. I love living in that world. Most of our listeners love living in that world. We live in one of the greatest, greatest times to be human, but on the flip side of that, you're you just, now that there's so many companies out there that are understanding and investing. So just not just talking to talk, but they're walking, they're walking the walk, investing in customer success and customer experience because as great as your product is great, if your PC technology is people still do business with people that they like, and they still do business with brands that they like. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:14:25) - And if you have rockstar, uh, customer success or folks that are working in your go to market or working on your customer, facing teams, these are going to be the guys and the gals that build relationships, learn more about your customers, understand what your product can do, what it can't do, what it should do, what it won't do and the better, and the faster you can kind of build that type of a feedback cycle inside of your business. The faster you're going to, you're going to grow in the faster. You're going to find new customers and bring on new logos. So I love that. Um, puck, I love to dive into the second CX pillar of tools. Um, spend a couple of minutes talking about your tool, talking about IRS agent, talking about some of the things that you're doing with your customers. And then I'd love to kind of pick your brain on what were some of the tools that you and your team needed to invest in. You needed to build up, to build IRS agent and to scale the business. 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:15:10) - Yeah, absolutely. Uh, tools is a central piece of our CX journey, uh, because we sit on in, uh, centrally between all the different systems that different functions use. So we have 10 plus key integrations between engineering, DevOps, customer support, success, and product management systems, enabling, you know, customers and employees to stay connected and informed. And it's not just connections. We also building automated data workflows between these systems to give an example, you know, if a customer is up for the new world, um, and there has been, uh, uh, they have been tickets coming in for that customer. The support team needs to know that information, especially as well as if there's a bug, which is impacting the same customer. The engineering team also needs to know that this is a high priority customer and they might need to prioritize the bugs and, uh, the issues that they're working on based on the business impact, as opposed to the loudest voice, getting the most attention. 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:16:05) - Um, yeah, so we have these widgets and alerts, which connect all these systems together, um, and trying to go into the product led growth more, more, more, where you don't really, um, need to think about customer support and CX in a very reactive way where we wait for customers to file support tickets, um, today with all the data and information, which is present in all these systems in silos, we can actually predict what issues are impacting customers the most, who are the impacted customers, how much business and revenue is now being impacted and take to the active actions as opposed to waiting for customers to the port issues. So that has been a central pillar of our strategy. Um, yeah, and then internally as well, uh, we use, uh, some pretty great tools that help us, you know, stay focused and disciplined. Um, we use for communication, we use slack, which has also helped a lot with asynchronous communication already with talking about, um, yeah, we use, uh, logic management and thought management tools like JIRA and others, which let us plan roadmaps. 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:17:06) - Um, as well as, uh, we actually leveraging slack for a lot of our customer support experience as well. Uh, because it's more real time customers feel that they get a personalized touch, um, and, uh, uh, we can really do a back and forth very easily with customers, just like we do it internally with, within our teams. We can also, they're like an extended team for us, which, uh, which is helping us, you know, uh, it's a pretty good relationship where we are helping them, you know, address any concerns they have, but also the insights and the feedback that they're sharing us, uh, with, with us is helping a lot and influencing our roadmap. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:17:40) - That's super cool. So I think, um, a few different things here. Number one, um, just with Iris agent and with the tool that you, you and the team have built again, companies, um, struggle sometimes to number one, just even understand the difference between leading leading indicators and lagging indicators and even really smart people sometimes struggle with this, which is like just being able to mathematically define what's happening before the event. And after the event, once a company starts growing and there's a ton of customers onboard, and there's a ton of team members that can get even harder to manage, just because it's more complex and there's more things going on, but you just, now that we're the modern portfolio management, modern customer portfolio management and modern customer success optimization. That's how you get there. Pollock. It's like being able to help understand and visualize the actions or the activities or the flags or the indicators that happen before an event that like signals. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:18:37) - And it's certainly after the event. And then more importantly, the way that the, that, that you talked about tying that back to your, your overall financial and your business performance or your portfolio health or your portfolio performance. This is going to be the stuff that like every company in the world is going to have to be thinking about this stuff, moving forward, even small companies. This is the funny part too. I, you know, there's, there's a, there's a bunch of awesome, um, um, startup growth focused companies that we work at CXC, and you can start this stuff when you've got your first 10 customers, you can start this stuff when you've got your first 50 customers, your first a hundred, but you better have it by the time you get into your hundreds of customers, because that's literally how you understand how to define, uh, what needs to be on the strategic roadmap, how to define and prioritize what your OKR sets are gonna look like on the product side of the south side, on the success side. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:19:23) - And then lastly, one last part that I don't think I want our listeners to think about. Cause I just don't know. People think about it this way. If you can get good at that stuff that also helps to amplify your IEX because people like to kind of see where the ship is going. Like everyone was on an airplane. We'd like to kind of pop, pop into that screen where you can literally see where your airplane is. That's like your employees, your employees need to have a basic understanding of what direction the ship is going. And I think that some of that stuff that you called out there that's like mapping to, you're literally showing your team where to go. You're showing your customers where you're going to go. And you're showing that you understand the things that are really going to impact an excellent experience versus.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:20:00) - That's really, really helpful stuff right there. Um, Paul, let's dive into the third pillar of process. Um, as you built the business, as you built the team and you've been able to work at a bunch of really cool companies before starting Iris agent, how did you guys kind of tackle the evolution of your playbooks, your standard operating procedures? How did you guys kind of wrangle processes you've grown the business and as you built your built out your customer portfolio? 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:20:24) - Yeah, I definitely, I think, um, when it comes to clauses, it's very important to have a workflow where we can document our past learnings and learn from them as opposed to making the same mistakes again and again. And especially because we began as a remote first organization, uh, in a distributed world, we had to document and, and learn those experiences. So, um, uh, so what we definitely encourage our team members to do is, uh, nothing very fancy or very long, it, it, but just like some shot some of the documents, uh, and we maintain that in our depository. And we also use intelligence search to search a clause, those awkward for ourselves, and also for our customers, um, where we can go back to them. And especially when the new employees joining in and 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:21:11) - Completely, 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:21:11) - You know, feeling a little bit isolated, they don't know how to tackle all those blocks, that blockers that do come keep coming across. So having quick access to that knowledge repository helps a lot in the moving those old blogs and making sure that, you know, uh, processes that all aligned. Um, and then, uh, I think having clear processes also make ensure that different functions know how they interact well with each other, as well as what the, the roles and responsibilities are, uh, how we, uh, how we improve our processes as we scale. Uh, we also extend that to our customers and customers support and success teams, where, uh, we use AI quite a lot to understand what the previous processes were, how common issues have been dissolved in the past, um, using search and recommendations to, uh, bring those insights to the fourth time. So that the answer, uh, so that we can resolve issues faster. 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:22:04) - And also thinking about escalation management process, which has been a little bit, uh, inefficient when it comes to escalating tickets from support to engineering, uh, it often happens as a one off way and they're duplicating the Dundon escalations that go out just because of, um, lack of information and silos, uh, between support and engineering. So, um, we focus a lot on that escalation management process, which is first identifying what is going on, who are the owners of this issue, who are on both on the engineering side, on the support side, on CSM side, um, and then figuring out what is the impact of that, who are the customers were impacted? What is the revenue, which is impacted and then building out processes slowly and gradually on how we deal with incidents. Um, and what is our operating procedure? What, what sort of root cause analysis we do? How do we communicate with customers at different stages of an incident so that they feel that they are looped in, in the journey and they, uh, uh, they feel that they feel that they're heard or when they bring out an issue. And even when they don't bring out an issue when they're still being impacted. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:23:08) - I love that. I think it's a couple of things. Number one. Um, you mentioned just even having the team starting with just writing stuff down, get it documented, get it onto paper, get it up into the cloud. Um, but, uh, one quick question. Do you, is there a specific tool that you guys use to do some of your internal process creation or is it, is it simply Google? Is it a confluence system? Is it an LMS? How do you, what do you guys use? 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:23:32) - Uh, we use, uh, Google, uh, coming from Google. I have a spot for that. So we use G suite pretty extensively. I think it's called workspace now. Uh, so documents, Excel sheets, and also linking that into slack and, you know, small actions of opening conversations, like now exploring some other tools like Goodwin notion as well, where we can linking between different resources so that people can, uh, jump easily between those resources. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:23:58) - Yeah, that's all. Okay. So awesome. Thank you for sharing that Google, literally you can build, you can build a multimillion dollar business run on Google, and it's pretty, it is for G suite workspace. Uh, but number two, I was going to say, um, Paula, you, you, you give the listeners such a good idea here, which is guys like, regardless of where this content or where this information or the, the, the, the, the, the, the, uh, both the incident based notes. And then just the general summary notes that you kind of position first Pollock, you start that stuff in a G doc, and you start that stuff by just having some of your SMEEs or some of the folks that own sales, their own marketing, their own success, your own product. And just starting to put this in one area. And what's funny is, um, the gain, especially in a growth focused startup where you're like fine and things are changing every day, and there's new people coming on at a month, and there's different people coming and going and all that fun stuff.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:24:45) - It becomes the Chronicle. It becomes the place where you are chronically and in your pro your, your you're documenting, not just like the history and not just like the important stuff of what's going on, but when you Chronicle the bad stuff too, or you, you, you Chronicle areas where it's like, Hey, don't go there. Like if you, or if you detect that, you're going into the space alarms should be going off, right? Like you get an executive sponsor involved or let us know. But like, that is such an easy place to start. I think for some of our listeners that are running bigger, larger, more mature, um, CX and CS guys, uh, CXCs teams, you guys are probably already way far ahead in leveraging and populating a confluence knowledge base, where you're already built all of these epic user knowledge insights into your CRM, or maybe you've built them into your issue resolution management system. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:25:27) - And that's the other funny thing, too, is most of these leading softwares today, they're literally building spaces and places for us to be able to build this stuff directly into the tool. So then you can mitigate some of that, that context switching. Um, last thing though that you, you just made me think of the incident reporting. I love that there's a few, there's a few of the startups that I helped build in New York Pollock. We would do the same thing because if you can get really good at just stopping and pausing, when shit does hit the fan, and you have a big, hairy problem with the customer, you have a big, hairy internal problem with your product or with your actual solution. Incident reports force people to come around the table, unpack it. Ask, ask like the five why's you just said root cause analysis go even deeper into why this happened, but those incident reports also just become such a great way of sort of documenting and flagging what you're not going to do again, or what you have to avoid or what you're going to eventually teach a team of people to be able to sort of navigate around. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:26:22) - And again, I think, I think even sometimes people don't realize like that type of thing. It's an easy way to mature your CX and your CS team. And it's a really great way to that once a month, maybe once a quarter, maybe even just once a year, let's say that you stack up 10, 15, 50, a hundred, a thousand incident reports, then you can start to do some fun stuff with actually compartmentalizing them. What's the breakdown. What was the leading indicators? What were the leading stakeholders that were constantly involved in this? What was the technology break? And it just shows you such a different picture of what you need to be thinking about as you move into the next quarter or the next month or the next customer. So all awesome ideas that are public. Um, partly I'd love to dive into the, the, the fourth and final, uh, six pillar of feedback. Can you spend a couple minutes talking about how you and the team at IRS agent has kind of gone about collecting and acting on your customer feedback, and then I'd love for you to spend a few minutes talking about how you leverage your team and your employee base feedback as well. 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:27:19) - Yeah. Yeah. Definitely feedback is a very important pillow. Uh, we really don't know how well we are doing unless we get those metrics and feedback from who we are serving. Uh, so we focus a lot on real time feedback, which means, uh, you know, the messages and tickets and other things and other such communications that we get from our external customers. Um, not just relying on, you know, surveys, which might have a low response date. Of course, that is still important data that goes into it. But also in the old time with advances in AI, we can do sentiment analysis to know, uh, you know, which customers might be really unhappy with the service and the sentiment might be dropping. Um, so I think that is a very important point. And the second is, uh, there's a lot of valuable feedback in how customers are using your products. 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:28:03) - So, um, how is their engagement and activity like, uh, do they, a lot of duke, lot of your users drop off at a certain feature, or maybe there's an issue with how that feature is configured and maybe it's not that easy to use. Um, what is the 80 20 rule, which 20% of your features drive 80% of your value? So instead of having a very long load map with lots of features in it, maybe it's better to focus on those important features and make them really good. So, um, yeah, so, you know, looking at customer sentiment in their communications, looking at product analytics feedback, um, and, and looking at what issues are they actually bringing up? How, how bugs, how many bugs are we getting deported or that we're internally discovering, and what is the impact of those issues and bugs. And we track all those metrics to see overall, are we doing well? And, um, I think feedback also ties into employee feedback, which you also brought up, uh, a little, a little bit earlier where, um, employees also feel good when, when they notice, uh, improvement in those metrics with customers, they feel that they're part of a journey they're having an impact as opposed to, you know, working in, in, in the dark without having any sort of feedback or mechanism to know how, how, how their actions actually impacting customers.

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:29:16) - Yeah, it's it's, it's so true. It's like, it's some of this stuff, just, um, when, when, when you can democratize some of the feedback, whether it's your customer feedback or your employee feedback, and you begin to paint a really clear picture and obviously every business is different. So even by the way, I was going to say, that's not even fair. Some even just starting in painting a blurry picture, at least a human can look at it and they can make an thrown interpretations of how things are going, right. Or what's happening obviously as your business matures and as your team evolves, it'll get tighter and more crystal clear, more color will be added to it. But it's just one of these things of like showing and sharing what the customers are saying and what the customers want more of what the, what the customers want less of. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:30:01) - But more importantly, I love that you, with the employee part you're right, asking the employees, do you, because honestly, when you talk about 80 20 employees already know, 80, 20, before you even go pull a hundred customers, like take your take, whoever the, the guys in the gals are that are speaking to or engaged with your customers or your product more than anyone else in the business, specifically on the front line, those folks already know the 80 20, they already know the five things that happen every damn day, that if you could fix them tomorrow, it would mitigate those five. Obviously it's going to create a new five. There's always going to be, there's always going to be the next couple of things that come up and that's the fun of business. And that's always the fun of, of our game here in the, in the CX and the CS land is unearthing that stuff and working with our, our comrades to figure it out. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:30:40) - But I think, um, the, this is just a, an area where I think modern companies are going to have to be really, really good at this Pollock. And I think that, um, companies that don't pay much attention to it are companies that aren't going to invest in. It really kind of understanding and measuring and managing their CX efforts in the UX efforts. I think they're gonna struggle. And I think we've already seen over the last two plus years, the world is seeing the greatest talent migration that's ever had. Right. Everyone calls it the great resignation. I think it's just a, it's the, it's a talent migration, a great, phenomenal. A plus players are moving to companies and they're moving to leadership teams that are going to invest in the things that we're talking about right now. And they're going to take it seriously. And they're, they're going to take this stuff as meaningful, actionable things that can push your business ahead. And that's going to be fun. There's going to be the fun places to work for most people. But, um, this is fantastic before we wrap up, I want to make sure, is there anything that you or the team is doing that you want the listeners to know about any upcoming events, any upcoming webinars, um, any, any, any, any things that you and the team are working on that you'd like to share with the six nation? 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:31:42) - Yeah, definitely. Uh, we have some exciting new things coming up on the roadmap. One is, uh, being able to use AI to dissolve, uh, common questions, which come up from customers, uh, leveraging AI to get the sentiment of support tickets, other introductions across different channels, and also bringing, uh, with the team of bringing siloed data together to serve the customers better, bringing in signals from, um, not just your bug tracking systems, but your product analytics tools to know how the customers are using, where are they struggling? Are there any of those indicators, um, uh, impacting the overall business and the tension, uh, with, with your organization? Um, yeah. And then besides that, uh, we are planning to do some webinars. Uh, please do check out a website, either station.com. Um, I will be posting, uh, upcoming updates, uh, over there. Yeah. 

Adrian, CXChronicles (00:32:36) - Awesome. We'll look, w this has been an absolute pleasure where you guys are doing some awesome work over there. And not only that we selfish, I'm not just saying this because selfishly, I think about this stuff all day, but you guys are in an incredible space. There's going to be some huge enterprise companies and mid-market companies that are going to need your guys' help with this. And there's a ton of more importantly, there's a ton of tomorrow's leading companies. There's a bunch of awesome customer focused business leaders listening right now that are going to build tomorrow's leading mid-market or leading enterprise customer or a business. And they're going to need to think about some of this stuff. And you need to think about how to leverage AI. They're going to need to think about how to leverage their support, their success, how to, how to support it, how to provide that 360 view that all of us strive for, but not all of us actually have it. Right. We talk about that plenty to have that 360 customer view and that 360 employee view, but you guys are building it when you're building an awesome solution to help companies, um, really kind of get there and achieve that. So that's awesome. So, um, probably it has been an absolute pleasure having a show. I look forward to keeping our conversation moving forward, offline, and best of luck to you and the team at IRS agent moving forward. 

Palak Dalal Bhatia, IrisAgent (00:33:35) - Thanks a lot, Adrian. It's been great talking to you and thanks so much for having me talk to you soon.